NEWS BRIEFS
Chatsworth, CALIF. — Highlighting the broad and immediate customer acceptance of the company’s SAN DataDirector and SAN directION SAN appliances, DataDirect Networks released data covering the 90-day period following first customer shipment.
SANs appliances represent a new industry segment by incorporating the functions of connectivity, data virtualization and storage pooling, massive scalability, centralized management, integrated security, high availability through extensive fault tolerance and multi-vendor heterogeneous operation into a plug-and-play appliance. The SAN DataDirector and SAN directION SAN appliances complete the SAN appliance definition by adding the necessary dimension of ultra high performance through parallel processing.
Says Steve Duplessie, senior analyst with The Enterprise Storage Group, in Milford, MA, “SANs enable IT administrators to connect lots of heterogeneous servers over a high-speed wire to centralized, shared storage pools. However, what we got was a high-speed wire, and an enormous headache. Instead of being the end-all, early SAN implementations often resulted in less secure environments. Being able to partition SAN elements logically has been a long-time goal, and one that has been addressed in many ways to date. Finally, however, we have some light at the end of the tunnel: the SAN appliance.”
“Virtualizing all storage on the back end allows you to create a single storage pool, so you have investment protection,” continues Duplessie. “And SAN appliances handle all the LUN masking/mapping functions, so you can use heterogeneous hosts on the SAN. With the advent of SAN appliances, we’ll start to approach the levels of SAN utopia that we all hoped for.”
Alex Bouzari, chief executive officer of DataDirect Networks said: “Within 90 days of delivering the first SAN DataDirector appliance-powered SAN to a NASA facility on June 27, we shipped more SAN capacity and SAN bandwidth than we had in the last three quarters of 1999.”
“This overwhelming level of customer acceptance confirms the arrival of high performance, parallel processing SAN appliances as a new industry segment in which we have established a clear position of leadership,” continued Bouzari. “We are currently in discussion with customers anxious to deploy multiple terabits per second of rich media SAN streaming capability and over a petabyte of high performance SAN capacity.”
DataDirect Networks introduced the SAN DataDirector SAN appliance in April 2000. Customer shipments began on June 27, 2000. The SAN directION SAN appliance was announced in November 2000 with customer shipments beginning immediately following announcement.
The SAN DataDirector SAN appliance gives IT professionals the ability to quickly deploy a high bandwidth, virtualized, fault tolerant, scalable SAN using a plug and play appliance. The SAN DataDirector SAN appliance brings a wide range of next generation features to companies preparing to deploy SAN technology including data virtualization and storage pooling, massive scalability, centralized management, integrated security, high availability through extensive fault tolerance and multi-vendor heterogeneous operation. Complete information on the SAN DataDirector and SAN directION SAN appliances can be found at the company’s web site http://www.datadirectnet.com .
DataDirect Networks is a leader in the rapidly growing market for intelligent SAN network infrastructure solutions. The company’s products address the most demanding requirements of high bandwidth, highly scalable cross-platform shared data access and integrated data management services. For more information, visit their web site at http://www.datadirectnet.com.
============================================================